yeah i did the numbers for real now. if i exclude one specific impulse purchase that i'm likely to sell off, a maxed-out m1 macbook air literally would've cost me more than twice the price of my entire music gear collection combined. i know which spending choice i'm happier with
losing my mind at the mandatory IT corporate training which has a table for how long it takes to crack passwords of a certain length — to drive home that every additional character is an order of magnitude in cracking complexity — but they helpfully provide sample passwords that are abc, abcd, abcde, abcdef…, which is self-defeating the message to a truly impressive degree
3012. The Future of Orion
title text: Dinosaur Cosmics
(https://xkcd.com/3012)
(https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3012)
long post about why i really like the PSS-A50's “arpeggios” system compared to other Yamaha “styles” systems
i am really enamoured with the PSS-A50's “arpeggios” feature. it feels like i finally found the version of Yamaha's “styles” system that actually really clicks with me. i've tried two other takes on this before, the PSR-350's auto-accompaniment and the QY70's pattern system…
the PSS-A50 arpeggios have two really important features:
and then these round out the package:
on the PSS-A50, you only have those 116 patterns stored in ROM, and you can only layer two arpeggios at once in the way i described. that's pretty limiting! but it's just so easy to do stuff within those constraints…
on the other hand, while the QY70 may let you layer 24 things, both custom ones and built-in ones (and there's like, hundreds of patterns in ROM), it's so much clunkier. and then on the PSR style system, well, you don't even control what the individual layers are; Yamaha have picked a set of layers and instruments for you, all you get to pick is the chord. that's way less flexible! high-end PSRs do let you edit these but it's even clunkier ^^; (and i don't own a high-end one anyway)
so in the end, the system that wins for me, if i just want to get in the zone creatively and come up with ideas, is the one i can most directly “play” with in interesting ways, and the PSS-A50 is doing great at that :3
on its own i can't make a full song, but there's MIDI I/O…
girls will really look at a $100 toy keyboard from Yamaha with USB MIDI that "does not support the [General MIDI] format" and go "challenge accepted"
>:3
Also I'm reading @GarethDennis's #HowTheRailwaysWillFixTheFuture on my train journeys today because it seemed the most appropriate book to bring with me. :)
For reasons no one is clear on, English people say someone is "sent to Coventry" to mean ostracised: not talking to the person, avoiding their company, and acting as if they no longer exist.
Today I'm technically being sent to Coventry for work, but it's because Coventry is a city where a thing is that I need to go look at.
The idiom, and its cathedral (rebuilt after WWII after being famously bombed to destruction), is all I know about Coventry so far.
my thought is that right now it's all or nothing in terms of when you use a "CW" your post will be hidden
if instead people can choose that only certain topics are default hidden and the rest aren't, then there's a lot less "but i don't want to hide this" stigma against using a subject line
not sure if this has been thought about before or if some other flavour of activitypub does it this way but i wonder if "CW"s would be better utilised if they were treated as email subject line and only defaulted to closed if a word in your custom blacklist appeared on it
i think that would push people to describe the content of posts much more if they're not implied to be opt-in, though this would also need a defacto "standardisation" of subjects, for example "uspol" vs "us politics"
Trans woman, bisexual, someone's fiancée, forever a programmer, poly, and former total mess